Frequently Asked Questions
Why did you start the development of StitchBuddy?
StitchBuddy is a hobby for me. Although more and more features are covered, its development is done in my spare time and without any commercial intention. What is charged for the shareware hardly covers my expenses, but this way StitchBuddy remains fun for me …I think there are three major reasons for StitchBuddy‘s development:
- First of all I‘m an IT professional and I was trained to a software developer over twenty years ago. At my job I don‘t code anymore, what I miss sometimes. StitchBuddy is a perfect opportunity to hone my programming skills and learn a lot about Objective-C and the Cocoa frameworks.
- Secondly I do love Apple computers and Mac OS X. In the early 90s I came in touch with my first Mac, providing 1st level support for Apple computers at work. Everything went to Microsoft Windows, but at home I switched back to Apple computers some years ago.
- Last but not least my wife sews a lot and purchased an embroidery machine in 2007. Transferring designs from her iBook was easy as the Janome MC350E can mount USB pen drives, but organizing embroideries was a pain. So she asked me to write an application to view Janome JEF files. The first Quick Look plugin „JEFview“ was born and distributed for free. People asked me to support Brother PES as well, so I adopted the code and released „PESviewQL“. As both plugins were very similar, I rewrote them completely to make the code easier to maintain and extend and created the StitchBuddy suite.